Gansey Nation

Buckie: 13 March

On Sunday the sun came out and the temperature reached an astonishing 11ºC, the kind of heat wave we haven’t seen since before the clocks went back. Seagulls dropped fainting from the cloudless skies and the freezer cabinets in Tesco were filled with panting puffins desperate for a bit of coolth. So we decided to peel off some layers and bare our knees and go off in search of something old to look at.

We didn’t have far to go: indeed, one of the more agreeable things about Caithness is that it’s littered with history the way other places have Starbucks, and you can hardly walk across a field without tripping over some ancient monument or other.

Achavanich overlooks Stemster Loch, a middling sized pond nestling prettily in a wide valley deep in the middle of nowhere. It’s a desolate sort of landscape, mile after mile of gently undulating moorland, as empty and barren as though the apocalypse had already happened but no one thought to let us know (wait—was that the Rapture? No, just a crow backfiring).

Standing stones with loch in the distance

The land is more or less peat bog as far as the eye can see, and every time you put your foot down on what looks like solid ground it sinks with a nasty sucking sound and dirty water seeps up over your shoe. The grass isn’t anchored to the land but seems to float upon it, like a shag carpet lying on the surface of a swimming pool.

Cairn and boggy approach

It’s a stunningly beautiful location, eerily quiet and lonely. We could hear some larks fizzing about overhead, and there were several frowsty sheep sleeping off the ovine equivalent of hangovers in a nearby field, but that was all: otherwise it was just us and the breeze, and about 36 jagged, broken, weathered standing stones which have stood there for a mind-boggling 4,000 years. The stones don’t quite make a full circle but are arranged in a horseshoe: the open end almost points towards the remains of an even more ancient cairn, now collapsed into ruin, like a great Megalithic soufflé.

Collapsed cairn with standing stones in distance

Meanwhile, I’m making good progress down the first sleeve of the gansey, which will be 16 inches long with a 3-inch cuff. There will be five diamonds, followed by an inch or so of plain knitting, and then the cuff. I’m decreasing at a rate of two stitches every fifth row; if my calculations are correct—and there’s a first time for everything—I should end up with some 96 stitches just before the cuff. Watch this space.

In parish notices this week, Judit has once again lapped us all and gone on to win the chequered flag with this splendid gansey, a tree and miniature twin rope pattern, knit in a blue-grey yarn (which is rapidly becoming my favourite gansey colour; it has something of the sea in it). Many congratulations to Judit once again.

And so the stones of Achavanich keep their secrets. No one knows why they were put up. They may have had some ritual purpose (human sacrifice or astrology), or it may have been the Stone Age equivalent of the same urge that leads local councils to erect hideous artworks in natural beauty spots—maybe the locals even complained to the tribal elders’ planning sub-committee. I rather like the fact that we’ll probably never know.

Buckie: 7 March

In the movie Amadeus the composer Salieri describes a piece by Mozart as sounding “like a rusty squeezebox”, and I daresay he’d have used the same simile if he’d listened to my breathing this week, now my cold’s come back. (Though whereas the Serenade for Winds K.361 made Salieri feel as if he was hearing the voice of God, my bronchial problems would probably have reminded him rather of a whoopee cushion in a pigsty.)

Oh, well: there’s always knitting. I tend to regard picking up stitches around the neck and armhole with the same enthusiasm as, say, a trip to the dentist or shopping for a pair of trousers, and as a result I tend to grit my teeth and go at it headlong—just to get it over with. This explains how I’ve finished the front, completed and joined the shoulders, done the collar and started the first sleeve, all in the space of a week. (It also goes some way to explaining why I have 17 unused pairs of trousers in my wardrobe, but let’s not go there.)

Watercoloury

By the way, I followed tradition by dividing each half of the body into three sections, each containing the same number of stitches, for the two shoulders and the neck. It always looks very wide at first, but the ribbed collar draws it in nicely. Next week I’ll explain my calculations for decreasing down the sleeve, but at the time of writing I still have to deal with the gusset.

Rainbow in snow shower

This week I’ve been reading a surprisingly entertaining book by Philip Hensher on the history of handwriting, called The Missing Ink. It’s full of fun little asides such as this splendid footnote about the time when Rupert Murdoch effectively sacked the editor of the Times after one mistake too many, making him Editor Emeritus. The editor asked what emeritus meant. Murdoch replied, “It’s Latin, Frank. The e- means you’re out. The meritus means you deserve it.’”

Snowdrops in snow

Hensher is a keen advocate of handwritten letters. He’s preaching to the converted in my case, of course—I’ve already spoken of my love of fountain pens, despite their annoying habit of getting ink everywhere (on one occasion, adjusting a ticklish nose hair after filling a pen with a startling shade of purple ink, I innocently strolled around Wick looking as if I’d been suffering from an alarming type of nosebleed or snorting iodine).

He suggests writing someone you care about a handwritten letter or a postcard. In this time of email and junk mail, “What could be better than to know that you’ll be the only nice thing in your old friend’s postal delivery that day?” Isn’t that a great thought? It happened to me recently, and I can vouch for it. Time, I think, to buy some fancy writing paper…

Buckie: 28 February

Ye Back

It’s that time of year again when we celebrate one of the highlights of the cultural calendar. No, not the Oscars—I speak, of course, of the Oddest Book Title of the Year Award.

If you’re new to this, it all started back in 1978 when the immortal classic Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice was spotted at a Frankfurt book fair. Since then it has included such gems as How to Avoid Huge Ships, How to Poo on a Date, Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers, and Bombproof Your Horse.

Snowy boardwalk at Camster Cairns

But if I had to choose my all-time favourite I’d have to stick with 2003’s winner, The Big Book Of Lesbian Horse Stories, which alas turns out, disappointingly, not to be concerned with the question of equine sexuality. (In fact, I strongly advise you to look it up on both the US and UK Amazon stores—it’s inspired some of the funniest reviews I’ve come across, some of them from horses.)

I’m a little disappointed in this year’s entries—I think to be eligible the titles should be unintentionally funny, so Transvestite Vampire Biker Nuns From Outer Space, which is all about cult films, shouldn’t really count—but Soviet Bus Stops and Paper Folding with Children are at least worthy contenders.

Pilot House, Wick

Snowdrops in Snow

Meanwhile, I was off work for most of last week with a nasty cold, the kind that leaves you gasping for breath if you do anything as strenuous as brushing your teeth. I went round wheezing like Keir Dullea playing an astronaut in 2001: A Space Odyssey (at one stage it got so bad that Margaret took to following me round the house, singing “Daisy, Daisy” at me slowly in a deep bass voice).

Standing up was problematical, sitting less so: and so I got a lot of knitting done. I finished the back of the body and the shoulder strap and am now over halfway up the front, and will soon be dividing for the neckline. There often comes a time on a gansey when you feel like you’re slogging on forever and hardly making progress, and then suddenly it all starts to come together in a rush: that’s what happened last week. It is, in a manner of speaking, all downhill from here.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to find a book to read. But which one? At the moment I’m torn between The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America and Reusing Old Graves. Decisions, decisions…

Buckie: 21 February

It’s not hard to find the used car district of Inverness, even without a map: you can tell you’re close by the clusters of garlic hanging in the windows and the way the locals cross themselves at the sight of strangers. Indeed, we stopped in at a Starbucks on the way, and when she learned why we’d come the anxious barista hung a rosary around my neck, saying, “For your mother’s sake.”

The used car salesman awaits

The curious thing was that I’d expected to have to resist the smooth blandishments of the sales staff and was bracing myself for a fight, like someone refusing to be taken in by the illusions of a street magician. But not a bit of it: they seemed completely unprepared (“You mean you want to buy a car?” they said doubtfully, as if they’d been secretly hoping we wanted an aardvark, or a holistic massage.)

None of the cars in the lot had any petrol, so each of our test drives were first to the nearby garage. At one point while we waited we could see mechanics frantically trying to jump-start one car whose battery was dead: I even thought I saw one blowing hopefully into the radiator, as if administering the kiss of life.

The salesman discovers I have a credit card

Another car had such a tiny engine that it was like driving a four-wheeled sewing machine. Part of the test route involved going up a long incline south of Inverness; this car gradually got slower and slower as it struggled up the slope, until elderly dog walkers we’d passed shortly before were waving cheerily as they overtook us and we were in danger of rolling back downhill. (Since between us and Inverness lie the notorious Berriedale Braes, a series of switchbacks that seem as if the road layout was designed by whoever invented the coat hanger, on an incline that begs for a funicular railway, we politely declined.)

Soon be spring

In the end we settled on a three year-old Kia Cee’d, a nice little car that ticked all the right boxes. Before deciding we looked up online reviews: the consensus was that it was reliable and good value for money, but boring. (That’s us! we thought: it’s a perfect match!)

Meanwhile, I’m enjoying knitting back-and-forth up the back of the gansey. If my calculations are correct (there’s a first time for everything) I have one more diamond to complete; and then it’s just the shoulder straps to do, after which it’s on to the front. I’m almost at the end of my first cone of 500g Frangipani yarn, too, so am just about halfway—always a good sign.

By the way, when I was researching this I got curious about why vampires are afraid of garlic. Turns out it’s such an old belief, dating back to Roman times, and so widespread (even to China), that no one really knows the origins of the myth. Insect repellent? Air freshener for unburied corpses? Your guess is as good as mine. And is it just raw garlic that affects them—what about in tomato sauce or good chilli? Can they be driven away by, say, garlic bread? All I can say is that I had garlic the night before and I wasn’t bitten by a used-car salesman. Draw your own conclusions…

Buckie: 14 February

You may recall that our poor old car developed a fault over Christmas. The car’s an automatic, and basically the problem is this: you’re bowling along at a jaunty 40 or 50 miles per hour, with nothing on your mind but your hair oil when suddenly, with no warning, the whole car slams to a near stop and drops into second gear, while the instrument panel lights up as though announcing a nuclear meltdown.

Hail shower over Sinclair Bay

I was once a passenger in a car that ran into a deer, and the sensation is almost identical—except in our case we don’t have to get out and pick antlers out of the radiator—but perhaps it most closely resembles the rapid deceleration you see when a jet plane lands on an aircraft carrier and is snagged by that giant rubber band. (The sensation a pilot has that his morning coffee and scrambled eggs are about to precede the rest of him into the windscreen is also, I imagine, rather similar.)

Well, we took it to the garage in Inverness last week and the diagnosis is more or less terminal—the cost of getting it fixed is over twice the value of the car. So now there’s nothing for it but to load the shotgun while the poor thing’s back is turned, take it for a last run in the fields and put it out of its misery. And then, brushing away a manly tear, go and find a replacement.

Snow on the mountains: Cromarty Firth

When I close my eyes and try to picture a used car dealer, the image that presents itself is of the weasels from Who Framed Roger Rabbit; and if you want a preview of what’s about to happen when I enter the showroom, imagine the scene from a nature documentary where slavering hyenas separate an elderly wildebeest from the rest of the herd.

Meanwhile, I knit. I have finally reached the point where I’ve divided front and back, having completed the underarm gussets. It feels like it’s taken forever, but it’s only been a couple of months and, now I think of it, I’m almost at the halfway stage—the end may not be in sight, but neither is the beginning. (As Stephen Dedalus observes in Ulysses: Life is many days. This will end.)

Finally this week, congratulations to Victoria in finishing this splendid gansey based on that of Richard Searle of Polperro on pages 124-129 of Rae Compton’s book. (Her picture is, as she admits, a little blurred—no doubt the camera shook with the emotion of finishing, as opposed to my usual excuse of cooking sherry mixed with paracetamol—but it’s still clear enough to see the pattern.) So well done to Victoria—and it’s good to know that gansey knitting is alive and well in the Azores.

I’m now off to pack a spare shirt for my car-buying expedition, as I’m sure I’ll emerge without the one on my back. (Now I come to think of it, I’m pretty sure it’s not a good sign when you get buyer’s remorse before you even purchase something…)

Gansey Nation

Buckie: 13 March

Buckie: 7 March

Buckie: 28 February

Buckie: 21 February

Buckie: 14 February

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